`Contact' To Play Here Next May / Best of Broadway 2000-01 lineup features 3 pre-New York shows

Steven Winn, Chronicle Theater Critic

Published
4:00 am PDT, Wednesday, June 7, 2000

Remember Abba Best of Broadway audiences will get a blast from the Swedish rock group's 1970s past with the London and Toronto hit "Mamma Mia!," the November musical opener of an eclectic subscription season announced yesterday.

"Contact," the dance play freshly crowned with a best-musical Tony Award this week, begins its national tour here in May. Kathleen Turner takes on a Hollywood legend in "Tallulah," a pre-Broadway solo show about tempestuous Southern actress Tallulah Bankhead due in January. A London production of one-act plays by Harold Pinter, "Celebration & the Room," makes its U.S. premiere in the fall of 2001.

"Saturday Night Fever," a stage adaptation of the 1977 film, which arrives in April, features vintage disco music by the Bee Gees. A February revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" starring Theodore Bikel completes the bill. The shows play at the Orpheum, Curran and Golden Gate theaters. Subscriptions are now on sale.

Three of the six shows -- "Mamma Mia!" "Tallulah" and the Pinter double bill -- will not have played Broadway by the time they open here. "We don't need the imprint of Broadway," Producer Carole Shorenstein Hays said. "We're excited to do these shows here first and build a bridge to the next generation."

"Mamma Mia!" cobbles such Bjorn Ulvaeus/Benny Andersson Abba songs as "Dancing Queen," "I Do, I Do, I Do" and "The Winner Takes It All" onto a book by Catherine Johnson about a mother and daughter in a Greek island setting. The show opened in London in April 1999 and in Toronto last month. The San Francisco run, beginning November 14 at the Orpheum, will be the show's first in the United States.

"Contact" links three dance stories about love, performed to recorded music by the Beach Boys, Bizet, Benny Goodman and others. There's some spoken dialogue in John Weidman's book but no singing. In the show's title segment, a suicidal ad man is pulled back from the brink by his visits to a swing dancing club.

Choreographer Susan Stroman won a Tony for the show on Sunday, as did two of the Broadway company's stars. No casting was announced for the touring production, which starts at the Curran.

KATHLEEN TURNER IN "TALLULAH"

The Broadway-bound "Tallulah" showcases film star Turner ("Body Heat," "Prizzi's Honor") as a ruminative Bankhead in Sandra Ryan Heyward's 1997 script. Turner, whose theater credits include "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Indiscretions" on Broadway, and the recent stage version of "The Graduate" in London, is directed by Michael Lessac.

Pinter new and old come together in the Almeida Theatre Company's double bill, staged by the playwright. In the recently composed "Celebration," a pair of married couples converge at a tony restaurant. Two couples also meet in the "The Room," a 1957 one-act set in a boardinghouse.

"Saturday Night Fever," launched on London's West End and then on Broadway, retools the Brooklyn working class hero's disco strut for the stage. Arlene Phillips directs and choreographs. The Bee Gees' score includes two songs written for this production.

Bikel returns to the role of Tevye in the 1964 musical theater classic, "Fiddler on the Roof," based on Sholom Aleichem's tales of a Russian peasant village. Bikel has logged more than 1,300 performances as the beleaguered milkman living up to the show's plea for "Tradition."